I don't know how we have fallen so far back in the tooling.
Javascript is a nightmare to debug, but it's probably just as much to do with architecture than debugging tools. Of course it's hard to debug a dozen tiny libraries written in ES6, transpiled down to ES5, packed into a module loader and flung around asyncronously.
JS debugging is fine in native, dependency free code I write. My sense is that debugging was something a lot of newer developers found out about later in their education and as such they never noticed debuggability and tooling wasn't up to par with older tooling.
Edit: Having said this, I still rely more on creating test cases to capture what I think should happen instead of stepping through the code in a white box way.
Same with Swift (iOS) development.